How to turn product documentation into video with the team you already have
Quick Answer
To turn product documentation into video means taking pages you already maintain, such as glossary entries, release notes and help articles, and producing a short video from each one. That translation already happens by hand in product marketing and enablement, where the source text, the audience and the approval path are settled.
Who already turns product documentation into video today?
Often someone who does not sit on the video team. A search marketing and content lead at a global CDN and cloud security company introduced himself to us this way.
"I work, you know, search marketing, right? I help the company get found. And my primary jam is the content creation."
He owns the pages. He knows which ones people arrive at, which ones confuse them, and which ones get rewritten every release. If one of them becomes a video, he is the person a video team would book time with anyway.
The alternative is booking the expert, which is its own queue. We wrote about the bottleneck that appears when a subject matter expert has to appear in a training video. Documentation is the easier start, because a page has no calendar.
Which product documentation should become video first?
Start with the page that already gets translated by hand. These questions find it.
- Which page does someone rewrite for a live session more than once a quarter?
- Which page produces the same follow up question from customers every time?
- Which page has one owner who can approve a change without convening anyone?
| Documentation type | The video it becomes | Who owns it today | What the manual version involves |
|---|---|---|---|
| Glossary page | A short definition explainer, one term per video | Content or search marketing | One person writing, recording and assembling alone |
| Release note | A walkthrough of what changed and where to find it | Product marketing | Rebuilt every release, from a page that is already written |
| Help article | A screen recording with voiceover, following the written steps | Support or customer education | Recapture whenever the interface moves |
| Onboarding guide | A sequence of short videos matching the guide's sections | Enablement | Assembled once, then presented live because updates are expensive |
The video types themselves are a short list. We catalogued them in the types of product demo video, and documentation feeds several of them without a new script.
What does it cost to turn product documentation into video by hand?
The part that is genuinely enjoyable
The same search marketing lead built video from his written pages and liked it.
"tweaking every little detail was super fun."
The part that eats the week
His next sentence.
"But wow, it was unbelievably time consuming."
Take a release note for a permissions change. The page exists, it has been reviewed, and legal has already seen the wording. The video version means a script that is mostly the page, a screen recording of the new setting, a voiceover, captions, and one round of review with the product manager who wrote the note. Every one of those steps is short on its own. Together they are what the content lead meant by unbelievably time consuming, and there is a new note every release.
The review step is where the time hides. A video and content coordinator at that same company named the part that helped her most.
"one of my favorite features though is the yeah, the transcript to video editing"
When the source is a written page, the transcript is the closest thing to the page, which makes reviewing a video through its transcript the natural way to approve it.
What happens when demand for product documentation video grows?
It arrives before the headcount does. A head of strategy and operations at a large US consumer bank wrote one line to us during a video platform rollout that has stayed with me.
"content creation is going to become a very real pain point"
He was describing a rollout that had not started producing yet. The tooling question was settled and the supply question was next. Documentation answers part of it: the source is written, the audience is defined, and the approval path already ran once for the page.
The owner is the variable. When the person who maintains the page can produce the video, the work stays where the knowledge is. When it has to route through a video team, it joins a queue behind campaign work. We covered that arrangement in making video without a video team.
FAQ
What does it mean to turn product documentation into video?
It means producing a video whose source is a page you already maintain, such as a glossary entry, a release note or a help article, rather than commissioning a new script.
Which product documentation should you turn into video first?
The page someone already rewrites by hand for live sessions. It has a proven audience, an owner who can approve changes, and wording that has survived review at least once.
Who owns product documentation video, product marketing or the video team?
The people we have talked with about this sit in search marketing, product marketing, enablement and customer education. Ownership follows whoever maintains the page, with the video team involved at the template and brand level.
Can you make a video from a help article without a video team?
People do it today, by hand. The content lead quoted in this post described that work as enjoyable and unbelievably time consuming in the same breath, which is a fair summary of the manual version.